Educated

My gaze dropped below the mountain and my breath caught. When
Grandma had been alive, she had, by nagging, shouting and threats, kept my
father’s junkyard contained. Now refuse covered the farm and was creeping
toward the mountain base. The rolling hills, once perfect lakes of snow, were
dotted with mangled trucks and rusted septic tanks.
Mother was ecstatic when I stepped through the door. I hadn’t told her I
was coming, hoping that, if no one knew, I might avoid Shawn. She talked
rapidly, nervously. “I’m going to make you biscuits and gravy!” she said,
then flew to the kitchen.
“I’ll help in a minute,” I said. “I just need to send an email.”
The family computer was in the old part of the house, what had been the
front room before the renovation. I sat down to write Drew, because I’d
promised, as a kind of compromise between us, that while on the mountain I
would write to him every two hours. I nudged the mouse and the screen
flickered on. The browser was already open; someone had forgotten to sign
out. I moved to open a different browser but stopped when I saw my name. It
was in the message that was open on the screen, which Mother had sent only
moments before. To Shawn’s ex-girlfriend Erin.
The premise of the message was that Shawn had been reborn, spiritually
cleansed. That the Atonement had healed our family, and that all had been
restored. All except me. The spirit has whispered to me the truth about my
daughter, Mother wrote. My poor child has given herself over to fear, and
that fear has made her desperate to validate her misperceptions. I do not
know if she is a danger to our family, but I have reasons to think she might
be.fn1
I had known, even before reading the message, that my mother shared my
father’s dark vision, that she believed the devil had a hold of me, that I was
dangerous. But there was something in seeing the words on the page, in
reading them and hearing her voice in them, the voice of my mother, that
turned my body cold.
There was more to the email. In the final paragraph, Mother described the
birth of Emily’s second child, a daughter, who had been born a month before.
Mother had midwifed the child. The birth had taken place at home and,
according to Mother, Emily had nearly bled to death before they could get to
a hospital. Mother finished the story by testifying: God had worked through
her hands that night, she said. The birth was a testament of His power.